First, foremost and most important of all: happy birthday, Mrs Cohen.
You don’t know me at all, and I only know it’s your birthday today because your son happened to mention it on Monday. He was right – it wasn’t marked on my calendar. But any mother of Jeff’s is a friend of mine, especially when the birthday is one of those big significant ones with a zero at the end. I had one of those myself last year, and it seems to me you need all the happy birthdays you can get when they come around. I hope you have a lovely day.
Given that a blog is a kind of on-line diary that anyone can read (that’s right, isn’t it?) I figure my topic for the week should be whatever is closest to the top of my mind at the time. That's what you put in a diary, after all. Last week it was press release printing and envelope stuffing. Sometimes it’s hard to know what to write about.
This week, in the absence of any little exciting moments which have distracted my attention from the daily round, the topic of the moment would seem to be editing. I’m in mid-edit of a third-in-series by one of our established authors, Linda Regan; it comes out in the UK in June, probably towards the end of the year in the US, it’s called Dead Like Her, and Marilyn Monroe features strongly but elliptically.
Last autumn, or summer if you go by the weather rather than the date, at a very pleasant lunch in Baltimore, someone asked me what exactly an editor was supposed to do.
The someone was an eminent scientist who just happens to be my cousin, and I kind of got the feeling he’d suffered at the hands of editors who had carved up prose which he considered to be peerless. I could sympathise to some extent, but I also felt it was up to me to fight the editor’s corner in what could have turned into a lively debate. (It didn’t, but that’s a different story.)
Fortunately the waiter arrived to take our order at exactly the right moment, so I had time to consider my response.
I ordered my crabcakes, then I said, “An editor’s job is to make sure the finished book is the one the author thought he (or she) wrote.”
Authors don’t have bad habits. They know the correct way to use apostrophes, and where to place commas so that the sentence balances and the emphasis is thrown exactly where they want it. They don’t show and tell in the same sentence, or repeat significant words four times in two paragraphs unless it’s a deliberate stylistic device. Their hero’s cobalt blue eyes never change to the colour of black coffee after a hundred pages or so. They recognise their self-indulgent darlings, and kill them without compunction. And they always, always, always triple-check every single historical fact and background detail.
Don’t they?
Editing is a process, of course, and two or three drafts can pass between the author and me before we're ready for that final nit-picking attention to tiny details. But when I send the final, copy-edited version back for approval, I always recommend very strongly that the author simply read it, without referring back to any earlier versions. And if it’s one I haven’t edited myself, I do the same when the final version arrives on my desk. In these cases, the only other version I’ve read is the first draft the author submitted, often months earlier. The difference between that first draft and the final one is often hard to pin down, but I always know I’m reading a better book: tighter, more focused, more polished.
The book the author thought s/he’d written, in fact.
There’s a popular impression that large publishing houses no longer do much editing. It’s a time-consuming process (don’t I know it!) and maybe it’s not regarded as cost-effective any more.
To me, and to every author I’ve ever worked with, getting it right is a matter of pride, so those hours are well spent.
Which book would you prefer to see on the shelf? The one with the misplaced commas and the hero who has eyes of two colours? Or the one you thought you’d written?
